Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
- James C. Collins
Notable Quotables
If people talk about you, being jealous, critical, and trying to make you look bad, don’t let that change you. You don’t need their approval when you have God’s approval.
- Joel Olsteen
When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.
- Seth Godin
We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.
- Phil Knight
We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone, discipline is what you do for someone.
- Zig Ziglar
Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.
- Reid Hoffman
What did I do that was right—and in what way could I have improved my performance? What lessons can I learn from that experience?
- Dale Carnegie
OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‘Trey’ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.
- Bill Gates
As you stumble and learn, stumble and learn again, resolve to talk to yourself as if you were your best friend. So no What a #?%$@ idiot! when your BFF smashes an egg on the floor, m’kay? Be cool, like the Fonz.
- Timothy Ferriss
Problem-solving becomes a very important part of our makeup as we grow into maturity or move up the corporate ladder.
- Zig Ziglar
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
- Bill Gates
I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating – is this the exact right mix? I think that’s – to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.
- Jerry Seinfeld
Google is a small fish in a big pond. We could be swallowed whole at any time. We are not the monopoly that the government is looking for.
- Peter Thiel
Crash diets don’t work.They don’t work for losing weight, they don’t work for making sales quota and they don’t work for getting and keeping a job.The reason they don’t work has nothing to do with what’s on the list of things to be done (or consumed). No, the reason they don’t work is that they don’t change habits, and habits are where our lives and careers and bodies are made.
- Seth Godin
Dell’s a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There’s enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.
- Michael Dell
God is a good God, and He gives good things to his children. No matter who has denigrated you or how much pain you’ve experienced in life, no matter how many setbacks you have suffered, you cannot allow yourself to accept that as the way life is supposed to be. No, God has better things in store for you. You must reprogram your mind with God’s word; change that negative, defeated self-image, and start seeing yourself as winning, coming out on top. Start seeing that marriage as restored. See your business as flourishing. See your children as enjoying the good things of God. You must see it through your eyes of faith, and then it will begin to happen.
- Joel Olsteen
I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.
- Thomas Edison
A lot of people feel very good about Mitt Romney and I think he’s going to do a great job.
- Donald Trump
Nobody is going to delegate a lot of power to a secretary that they can’t control.
- Michael Bloomberg
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
- Bill Gates
Give your good bacteria an upgrade and get your microbiome in shape. Faster fat-loss and better mental health are just two of the benefits.
- Timothy Ferriss
I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.
- Steve Martin
There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.
- Jerry Seinfeld
I think the move by Mr. Greenspan was welcomed by everyone here.
- Jack Welch
Artists don’t think outside the box, because outside the box there’s a vacumm. Outside the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you’ll never be able to do the real work of art. You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box. Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done. That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are available, and that’s where you can make impact.
- Seth Godin
I started thinking about joy. Everything in our society is so purposeful. Let’s bring joy back to the experience.
- Sara Blakely
Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.
- Henry Ford
The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did
- Ben Horowitz
Windows 8 is key to the future, the Surface computer.
- Bill Gates
I didn’t invent the hamburger. I just took it more seriously than anyone else…We take the hamburger business more seriously than anyone else.
- Ray Kroc
The millionaires and billionaires who chose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young. This secret needs to be spread widely.
- Gina Rinehart
If you can discipline yourself to read, you can free up two years of your life for the good stuff!
- Seth Godin
Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Now that we had a name, we had to have a trademark for the side of the shoe. It was 1971, and Ford had spent $2 million getting a trademark. We didn’t have $2 million, so I went by the graphic arts department at Portland State, and there was a woman there saying, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get enough money for the dress for this prom,’ And I said, ‘I have a job for you.’ I paid her $2 an hour, and she spent 17 and a half hours. So $35 and she came up with what is now the swoosh.
- Phil Knight
The part of uranium that’s fissile – when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two – is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.
- Bill Gates
Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.
- George Soros
Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
- Jack Dorsey
A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.
- Peter Drucker
I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category.
- Jeff Bezos
MARCH 1 Envision Your Dreams I counsel you to buy from me . . . salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. REVELATION 3:18 DO YOU LOOK UPON your life with eyes of faith? Think of it this way: when we close our eyes, we should see more than we do when we have our eyes open. See your whole family serving God. See yourself rising to new levels of effectiveness. See yourself stronger, healthier, and living a more abundant life. See God using you in.
- Joel Olsteen
We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.
- Howard Schultz
The reason a lot of people do not recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls looking like hard work.
- Thomas Edison
Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. That is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men have at last led them. They would do well to pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverise, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now—for one occasion only—his Master.
- Winston Churchill
The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.
- Napoleon Hill
There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I have many children, as you seek you may find that this the last one till he must die before he must reach the becoming of mankind. Many men have failed but i have surpassed their expectation of being a Jedi master.
- Yoda
I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.
- Bill Gates
My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.
- Elon Musk
1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.
- Peter Thiel
Nobody wanted to believe Jack Ma.
- Jack Ma
The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s perhaps one of the very few unifying factors.
- Timothy Ferriss
When we launched the WineLibrary website in 1996, I didn’t even own a computer yet. I just understood that there was an opportunity here to market in a different way.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
One has to live with the fact that some corporate decisions are going to be wrong. As long as most of the decisions are right.
- Michael Otto
It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.
- Napoleon Hill
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.
- John Maxwell
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
- Jack Welch
No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.
- Michael Bloomberg
Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value.
- Warren Buffett
The Silver Spoon, the best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years.
- Timothy Ferriss
I want to sit with 80- and 90-year-old people more than anyone. They have played this game before. Not one of them has told me, ‘I wish I had more money.’
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
- Timothy Ferriss
A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so.
- Ben Horowitz
When those in power use shame to bully the weak into compliance, they are stealing from us. They tell us that they will expose our secrets (not good enough, not hardworking enough, not from the right family, made a huge mistake once) and will use the truth to exile us from our tribe. This shame, the shame that lives deep within each of us, is used as a threat. And when those in power use it, they take away part of our humanity.
- Seth Godin
We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
- Michael Bloomberg
This country provides opportunities. If you don’t take advantage of them, it’s your own fault.
- Sam Huff
If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.
- Elon Musk
Until you have learned to be tolerant with those who do not always agree with you, you will be neither successful nor happy.
- Napoleon Hill
What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.
- Bill Gates
In creating an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread. It’s the virus that does the work, not the marketer.
- Seth Godin
Look at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. They have all entered many sectors, and actually, in many of those sectors, they weren’t as early as Tencent.
- Ma Huateng
When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
- Walt Disney
2006, I started ‘WineLibrary TV.’ To build ‘WineLibrary TV,’ I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.
- James C. Collins
People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.
- Zig Ziglar
I’m truly passionate about basketball. I’m not as passionate about baseball as I am about basketball, but I watch baseball and I watch football. I love sports in general.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
The Pitch is your mechanism for persuasion. Persuasion is the goal. You’re trying to convince them of someone or something, and they might initially be resistant. This isn’t a nice casual conversation; it’s the Guerrilla P.R. version of a first strike.
- Michael Levine
The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.
- Peter Drucker
I don’t like to beat people down. They need to be lifted up.
- Joel Olsteen
Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.
- James C. Collins
Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.
- Oprah Winfrey
Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.
- Ray Dalio
Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don’t control what you think you can’t control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.
- Napoleon Hill
There is no shoe school, so where do you recruit people for a company that develops and markets running shoes? The running track… We and the consumer were one and the same.
- Phil Knight
Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.
- Nelson Mandela
We often hear military experts inculcate the doctrine of giving priority to the decisive theatre. There is a lot in this. But in war this principle, like all others, is governed by facts and circumstances; otherwise strategy would be too easy. It would become a drill-book and not an art; it would depend upon rules and not on an instructed and fortunate judgment of the proportions of an ever-changing scene.
- Winston Churchill
My father worked all the time.
- Michael Bloomberg
I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.
- Bill Gates
We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there. The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home. We had no money. You have to work out of your home when you have no money.
- Steve Wozniak
Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.
- John C. Maxwell
By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.
- Ben Horowitz
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best….”
- Thomas Edison
Look back in forgiveness, forward in hope, down in compassion, and up with gratitude.
- Zig Ziglar
If you do not see yourself as a winner, you cannot perform as a winner.
- Zig Ziglar
What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
- Donald Trump
But each country has to advance and move at its own speed.
- Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Alsaud
Nothing is as powerful as a changed mind,
- T.D Jakes
As I get, I give. Giving as you get is critical. It has everything to do with being happy for yourself, and making others happy is the cause of making yourself happy, and it’s the cycle of giving and getting.
- Russell Simmons
The single reason for a salesperson’s existence is to get the Buyer’s commitment. Just how poor are salespeople at their jobs? In a study of professional sales people (those who sell full time), 50% failed to ask for the buyer’s commitment to buy.
- Jerry Vass
I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got to dream big and then dream bigger.
- Howard Schultz
Nothing will work unless you do.
- Maya Angelou
